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Philipp Lenssen writes "The blogger community is fighting back, though in ways not everyone may like: they are Googlebombing the Wikipedia page on online poker for the phrase "online poker" to make it rank higher in search engines. "Online poker", along with "Viagra", "mortgage" and "debt", are keywords heavily represented in comment spam, which itself aims to boost the Google ranking for a particular site and phrase. The Wikipedia page is currently third in Google."

i'm not sure i follow their logic here... lower the page ranking of the sites that should be higher because they are oft linked to from spam; by google bombing and artificially raising the wiki; which devalues googles results?

If someone searches for online poker; they probably want to play online poker, which is what the wiki page is displacing. BUT the fact that its only 1 page that leaves 9 others on top, as the article said; would just cause the one spammer who is knocked off the front page to spam that much more; which will cause the other spammers to spam more to keep on the front page.... It just seems pointless:p Someone is laughing here

My blog is probably the least trafficed site on the internet. Google doesn't even index the blog's sub pages as they're php and not directory roots. I basicly do news commentary. That's it.

I get between three and five entries comments every day from online poker spamers. They do their comments in HTML, and add H1 tags to the entire thing. Each comment consists of about 50 links ranging from online poker to places to buy viagra.

I write this as a hobby. I pay for it out of pocket, it makes no revenue and, as I don't sell ad space or use ad words, I never expect it to.

If I'm not going to use the resources I paied for to advertise why should someone else get to? This kind of behavior is inconsiderate, it's invasive, and it's really fucking annoying.

So yea.... I'm tired of being used as free advertising for something I'll never see a dime from.

Actually, most spam gets sent for SUCCESSFUL online enterprises. TONS of people play poker online, and they give MASSIVE referral bonuses to websites who can generate new players ($65 a pop!) - because competition for new players and site-loyalty is so high. Most casual players pick one site and stick with it.

Unfortunately, no one wants to play it. If they did, then these cretins wouldn't need to pollute the internet to get people to play it. The same with herbal viagra, or any of the rest of the crud they are peddling.

People do want to play it, or it wouldn't be profitable. Internet gambling is believed to be second only to sex in terms of profitability.

You're missing the point. The fact that cars, or alcohol, or soap powder is advertised doesn't mean that no one wants to buy these products. People do want a car, to drink alcohol, to wash their clothes. But there is competition by multiple companies to get people to buy their product rather than another. So it is with Online Poker. It's grown to be a very popular pastime over the last couple of years, with a large income for the operators. People do want to play, and operators want to attract plaers

Bloggers bug me. The caption should be understandable by blog-free geeks, not just those on the inside. A concise one sentence explanation clearly describing WHY the bloggers are doing this would make the whole thread much more useful. As it is, I had to spend 10 minutes trying to figure out why bloggers were googlebombing the wiki. Please, when a reason exists for some fact, state the damn reason clearly! Example: Bloggers, frustrated by poker sites posting spam in the comments sections which follow blog entries, decided to fight back by displacing comment-spammer's rank in google searches..... then insert the rest of the caption.

And you who are about to say that it already says that -- it does ONLY if you approach the paragraph with that knowledge. For someone outside the blogging community - it's just confusing. Last, if you still like it as is, fine, that's why I don't read blogs. Too often they are crypitc and snooty.

I sympathize with the effort involved when confronted with new words, but I reject the attitude of berating people for using different terms in different fields.

Wrong. That isn't my attitude. My point was that the article summary was vague, incomplete, and poorly written. Rather than explaining any of the "why are they googlebombing", it basically only states that they are googlebombing. Granted, once you understand the background, the foreground makes sense, but as a summary directed at users who m

Bloggers link to each other so they can find each other, not so they have pagerank coming out of their ass.

Spammers, however, discovered this pagerank, and started abusing it. Google 'solved' this problem by giving bloggers the ability to add a note to a link saying 'Don't give this any pagerank'.

However, spammers, being about as smart as pond scum's waste products, continue to spam blogs, even the ones that had such attributes added automatically. (These are the same people who attempt to deliver mail to hundreds of addresses on my server that do not and never have existed.) Spammers apparently cannot tell blogs apart.

And hence, to force the issue, blogs have started abusing the power themselves. Google now must write something to tell blogs apart from normal websites, or its entire database will be under the control of bloggers, mwhahahahaha.

The hope is that if google fixes this, within two or three years spammers who have been spamming blogs will have drowned by staring up when it's raining or deciding to go outside for a smoke break while on an airplane, and the new crop won't ever have spammed any blogs. (Spammers cannot learn to stop doing things, only to do new things.)

Of course, bloggers may be overestimating the intelligence of spammers by assuming they know how to operate airplane doors or tilt their head back.

That's a fairly complex process, which is already an excellent deterrent. It doesn't seem very hard to counteract, either. Actually, I can't really fathom how it would work.

(1) You send the blog server a request for the web site containing the form. (2) The server generates a captcha with an associated hash and sends it to you along with the form. (3) You send a request with the decoded captcha, the hash and the form data attached.

Now the process you described would take captcha + hash you receive in 2, and get the decoded image from wherever. Later on, he goes on with 3, using the decoded text. Now my first idea would limit the time that could pass between 2 and 3, and I think that's a viable suggestion - at worst, an innocent poster will surpass the limit because he takes too long to create a post, but that's not a problem, we'll just send him a new captcha which he can decode within seconds.

But in any event, when you try to do 3 (ie post your spam) a normal human will have to do 2 (ie get the form) before that, so the server would know which captcha he sent you last, and sending the hash and decoded text for any other captcha wouldn't work. A script doesn't have to do 2 before doing 3, because a script doesn't manually fill out a form, but that alone is an odd behavious a server could be programmed to pick up. Sending any other decoded captcha than the one received in 2 is ineffective, if step 2 is skipped, then there is no legal captcha and no post. This would prevent "farming" blogs for captchas to be decoded and used at a later stage.

Sorry if I'm not overly clear (to say the least), I hope at least the time limit argument is simple enough to be understood.

Google did a study of how many people used that button. They found it was terribly insignificant, but important to the feel of the Google main page. I can't remember where I heard it of course, but I'm pretty sure it was linked on/.

That sounds familiar. I would use it more (like when going to a website I am familiar with, and know is number one, but don't want to type or don't know the whole result), but I don't want to have to move my mouse to click. I normally just hit enter, since I don't know a way in Safari to go to the I'm Feeling Lucky button.

Google did a study of how many people used [the "I'm Feeling Lucky"] button.

I no that I rarely ever use it, and when I do, it's typically for something that I already know it will take me to, or for flaming.

One example is the download page for PuTTY. I know the first link for "download putty" in Google is always the page I want, even though I can never remember the URL for that page. It's a convienent way for me to get what I need quickly.

The second way is much more fun. When n00bs on IRC, usenet, or mailing lists ask questions that quite easily could have been answered with a google search, I typically do a quick search and see what's in the first few links. If the very first link comes up with the information, I'll flame 'em and tell them to drop "blah blah 123" into google and tell it you're feeling lucky, and not to come back again until they learn to do this always.

Well, I suppose the button "I'm feeling lucky!" makes a lot more sense in the context of online poker.

In all seriousness, some people I know have started using google IFL links on blogs rather tahn direct links. The idea is that in five years if the Captain Crunch brand changes, an I'm Feeling Lucky search for Captain Crunch will probably take you to the new page.

This stunt actually will increase blog spam volume for online poker in order for the spammers to compete with the wiki, also it has expanded the number of people trying to spam wiki pages and it will reinvigorate general blog spam for publicizing the fact that blog spamming still works.

If you want to learn about Online Poker [wikipedia.org], it is far better to learn from a reputable source. Almost everyone else out there is going to try and fleece you for a buck. Which of the other top links is not trying to get you to part with your greenbacks?

In a deeper spiritual sense, learning gambling is like learning life itself. The Wikipedia is capable of teaching people to see the forest and the trees, so to speak. Disinterested, independant, impartial--the Wikipedia is an ideal teacher of contentious issue

Wikipedia is the ideal teacher of NON-contentious issues. When it comes to contentious, especially politicial issues, it is no more an ideal "teacher" then a Usenet political forum: fierce partisan editors engage in change-wars in Google entries of controversial subjects. The Bush and Kerry entries in the last election were a great example of this.

Finally, search creates problems for lower-literacy users...[T]hey have difficulty processing search results...As a result, [they] often simply pick the first hit on the list, even if it's not the most appropriate for their needs.

In this case, the page is highly relevant, and the links are being placed by website owners on their own websites, rather than spammed to comment pages and referrer logs by automated spambots.
There's a big difference.

It might help if the Wikipedia article contained more information to reflect the critical view of online poker. As it is, it's a bit biased, just telling how and why it's become popular... but not much about why it's also become so unpopular.

There was a circle of people standing around a man borne up onto a pile of ground, and tied to a stake. The circled crowded the man, yelling insults and spitting in his direction. Just as the first person in the crowd picked up a stone to throw it, a hand siezed his wrist from out of nowhere.

It was Jesus. Jesus said "let he who is without sin throw the first stone." Everyone in the circle looked down, and the man on the stake looked hopeful . Slowly but surely, all eyes fixed on Jesus, who realized that

The difference in ranking could be due to the fact that there are different google servers around the world. Each one does its own ranking, and different servers can give different results for the same terms.

I can't see this as a good thing.
1. Blog spammers will fight back at blogs - mostly innocient people who have nothing to do with this war.
2. Blog spam can get wikipedia in trouble by violating Google's guildelines [google.com].
3. The recent nofollow [google.com] tag attribue will dimish the value of blog spam.

Authors may wish to define additional link types not described in this specification. If they do so, they should use a profile to cite the conventions used to define the link types. Please see the profile attribute of the HEAD element for more details.

but how the hell does this help? The online casino people are still going to spam your blog. Just because one link out of the 31 million pages wont deter a user. There are paid ads anyways. This is a waste of time if you ask me. A better way to combat this would be to come together to maybe come up with a plugin or hack to have a 100% system against spam.So the online casinos would be forced to stop auto spamming people.

Of course this trouble will never end if these companies have like little gnomes manually spamming blog/blog rings.

Rusty on k5 recently pointed out an interesting scam that works against captchas like this.

Apparently spammers were putting up free porn sites, but to get the free porn you had to enter the answers to captcha prompts that were scraped from other sites. People love their porn, so this gave them thousands of valid captcha responses.

Then a person comes along for the free porn. The moment they hit the page, the spammers site goes off to yours, gets the Captcha, and the users decodes for porn. Instantly the spammer posts whatever on your site.

So basically you cannot win this way, as you can never make the delay for accepting the captcha result any shorter than what a valid reader will need to enter - and there is literally no delay between the porn proxy and the valid rea

Googlebombing is just a result of the problem where Google can return totally irrelevant results to a search: pages that don't even contain the phrase/words being looked for.

A good example is a search on "to be or not to be". Even in quotes, 2 or so of the top 10 results are dross: they do not even contain the phrase. Google has some great things, like so many more results and caching, but it is annoying to have bogus results come up like this. If they, by default, actually returned only the pages that co

Results 1 - 10 of about 773,000 for "to be or not to be". . (0.14 seconds)

Shakespeare - To be, or not to be: that is the question... William Shakespeare - To be, or not to be (from Hamlet 3/1). To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The...www.artofeurope.com/shakespeare/sha8.htm - 3k - Cached - Similar pages

To BE or Not to BE, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love...All you ever wanted to know about barium enemas but were afraid to ask from the webisite for adults, married adults that is.marriedadults.com/bariumenema.php - 12k - Cached - Similar pages

To Be or Not to Be (1942)To Be or Not to Be - Cast, Crew, Reviews, Plot Summary, Comments, Discussion, Taglines, Trailers, Posters, Photos, Showtimes, Link to Official Site,...www.imdb.com/title/tt0035446/ - 47k - Cached - Similar pages

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""to be +or not to be" (quotes and all) give you nothing but appropriate answers on the fist page"

Did you even try it? I did. The plus makes no difference. Results 8 and 9 do not contain what I was looking for. Besides, having to put + in front of words INSIDE a quote sure is a hassle: is it so hard for a search engine to find the phrase without having to learn complicated rules?
Apparently, it is not hard. Long forgottten www.lycos.com produces 100% relevancy in the first 10 results (as opposed to an 80%

The poker sites themselves are not directly to blame, however it's their affiliate programs such as this one [paradiseaffiliates.com] which encourage the spamsters.

As you can see they can be quite lucrative. Spammers also post poker site's software to Usenet and p2p networks together with a bonus code that benefits their account, with some steady play these bonuses can be cleared in no time leaving themselves a tidy profit.

And the Wikipedia page is not protected [wikipedia.org] right now which means that the spammers or trollers can add their links directly to that page by clicking edit this page [wikipedia.org] link and their changes will be visible immediately. Wikipedia administrators can protect that page by clicking this link [wikipedia.org] and adding {{vprotected}} at the top of the article to protect it from vandalism [wikipedia.org].

If I were to search for "online poker" I'd be sure to read the TITLE and the two lines or so that Google gives you from the site to figure out if it was a relevant result or not.

If I already know what online poker is, there's no need for me to go to a wikipedia page, no matter how high it's listed. Conversely, if I'm not interested in playing, I'm not going to go to some site unless I haven't had my daily dose of cookies.

What on earth are they thinking? That by boosting the page rank of one particular page nobody will notice the other nine pages that link to online poker sites in a Google search? They are so locked in the mentality of link whoring and otherwise abusing Google's search results that they see everything in the world as how it is related to Google. Imagine a mechanical engineer trying to design an auto transmission by putting up a page with a bunch of links to the Wikipedia entry for "Automobile transmission" and hoping Google spiders it.

Well, no surprises here: it turns out that the vapid tools who maintain "blogs" really are as stupid as they seem.

Wouldn't it be better to implement the rel="nofollow" [google.com] for these links? After all, they should be trying to punish the spammers, not reward Wikipedia (which is good but doesn't help with the spam problem).

Well, I can't help but make the obvious observation that it's another example of sad greedy bastards trying to exploit other people's good will. Dare I say "intuititively obvious to the most casual observer". The online poker page itself is nothing but a obvious scam in search of more free advertising, and it should be permanently deleted from Wikipedia. The only point of gambling is that it's a tax for being bad at math, and all the repackaging is just various disguises for the essential exploitation of very simple behaviorism. Random reinforcement is the best, and most resistant to extinction.

Again I say "sad". I vote to delete--except that that's pointless, too. The people who want to sucker other people via online gambling are of course much more strongly motivated than people like I am. I'm just annoyed. They're dreaming of striking it rich, if only they can find enough suckers fast enough.

Who really cares about this? Honestly let them mess with the search results. Dumb people shouldnt be allowed on the internet anyways and im sure after 2 seconds any average joe will figure out the wiki isnt online poker...this is being made into to big an issue.

If you really want to thwawt the link spammers, what you need to do is make sure 9 other wikipedia pages also get well linked for the phrase 'online poker', thereby meaning there are no [profitable] spammed linked on the front page of google results.. The pages 'online [wikipedia.org]' and 'poker [wikipedia.org]' would be a good start..

[rant on]
Problem:- the bloggers leave pages open to the public, that anybody can modify, and they get spammed by the poker places.

Solution:- Spam google, so that the highest ranked page on the net for 'online poker' is, you guessed it, a user modifiable page, hosted somewhere else. They have made the wikipedia page the most valuable real-estate on the net regarding the given search term, so, now it's wikipdeia's problem, that page is going to be target of constant spam/attack/redirect attempts.

I would have thought the blog types would understand, and target a static page, where this is not a problem. No, they gotta take the problem from thier insignificant little nothing sites, and turn it into a major problem for one of the most significant sites on the internet. Way to go assholes, what a wonderful way to cause a huge amount of problems for a very valuable net resource, that's done nothing to cause problems for your precious 'blog community'.

There is a reason that most folks find the rantings in blogspace a total waste of otherwise useful bandwidth, this is yet another good example. Only the selfish shortsighted stupidity of the blog community would come up with the idea of solving thier problem, by making a wikipedia problem instead.

That's about as smart as an anvil folks, and it's this kind of stupidity that causes most of the world to view blogspace as wasted space. Whoever came up with the idea of google-bombing the term 'online poker' with a wikipedia page, should be taken out back and strung up. Didn't a single one of the bloggers in question have enough intelligence to figure out how big of a problem this is going to create? Now that wikipedia is in the top page, every poker spammer in the world is going to be trying to hijack that page. Are bloggers in general really this dumb ?

That does seem strange. If it was a French Bullfrog site instead, it would be quite understandable.

"I have developed some methods for controling it, but I do not want to divulge them publiclly since the bad guys would then know my counter measures"

Yeah, I know. Those French bulldog guys play hardball. They monitor all the Slashdot posts, too, so you are wise not to reveal your tricks. I know myself, that every time someone mods me down, it has to be one of those bulldog spammers.

"Click on http://www.parismastiff.com for your best Gallic bulldog deals!"

Well, for everyone else, here are some strategies to combat comment spam. There should be plugins or upgrades available for whatever software you're using that add these features:

1) Add ref="nofollow" [slashdot.org] to all links posted. Google will then ignore this link when assigning pagerank. This is invisible to the user.
2) Force the browser to calculate a javascript hash [weblogsinc.com] everytime a comment is posted. This prevents automated spambots from posting comments. This is invisible to the user.
3) Filter for common words (viagra, poker) then manually approve those comments. This is a lot of work for you, but no work for your users.
4) Use captchas [wikipedia.org] - your users must type in the text in pictures when posting a comment. This is extremely intrusive for your users.
5) Approve every comment. Lots of work for you.
6) Disable comments. It's better than giving up your blog as, sadly, many people are choosing to do.

I detailed this elsewhere. All Google has to do is add a filter to its results so that pages that do not actually contain the search word/phrases do NOT show up in result lists.

This used to be standard search-engine behaviour, and because of this, results used to be a lot more accurate (unless they were merely outdated, but even in this case, the results were accurate at one time!).

They're trying to remove the incentive for slimeballs to generate blog spam, but rendering one particular variety of it ineffective. It may be sisyphean, and ultimately not actually do any good, but that is what they're trying to accomplish.